These bits of flying jewelry enjoy the Butterfly Bush out front:
This one has lost both “swallowtails” and a chunk of its left wing. The blue spots indicate it’s a female; we hope it laid a bunch of eggs in the magnolia bush next door…
Category: Photography & Images
Taking & making images.
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Giant Swallowtail Butterfly: Up and Away!
The Giant Swallowtails once again returned to the Butterfly Bush at the front window this year:
Giant Swallowtail – Liftoff Their wings never stop fluttering while they feed:
Giant Swallowtail – feeding I’ve never seen butterfly wings in this position:
Giant Swallowtail – Downstroke All hand-held with the Sony DSC-H5 and no additional lenses. The top picture was underexposed by two stops to remove the background. The bottom picture has fill flash in addition to full sun backlight.
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Decorative Slug
This critter trundled across the driveway after a shower wetted the area:
Orange slug on asphalt They do some damage in the garden, but we let them alone elsewhere…
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Monthly Image: Trumpet Vine With Solitary Bees
I tagged along on another Master Gardener field trip, this time to Innisfree Garden near Millbrook NY, and took a bunch of closeups. This was supposed to feature just the solitary bee working the blossom, but …
Solitary bees in Trumpet Vine – 2560×1440 The little gadget off to the left blundered into the depth of field at exactly the right moment. Couldn’t do that again if I tried…
Maybe they’re wasps. It probably matters only to another insect of the opposite polarity.
Taken with the Sony DSC-H5, no lenses, hand-held. The image is a dot-for-dot crop from the full frame that’s exactly sized for my landscape monitor.
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Measuring Objects for 3D Modeling: USB Video Camera
A brace of “Fashion” USB video cameras arrived from halfway around the planet. According to the eBay description and the legend around the lens, they’re “5.0 Megapixel”:
Fashion USB camera – case front The reality, of course, is that for five bucks delivered you get 640×480 VGA resolution at the hardware level and their Windows driver interpolates the other 4.7 megapixels. VGA resolution will be good enough for my simple needs, particularly because the lens has a mechanical focus adjustment; the double-headed arrow symbolizes the focus action.
But the case seemed entirely too bulky and awkward. A few minutes with a #0 Philips screwdriver extracted the actual camera hardware, which turns out to be a double-sided PCB with a lens assembly on the front:
Fashion USB video – case vs camera The PCB has asymmetric tabs that ensure correct orientation in the case:
Fashion USB camera – wired PCB rear In order to build an OpenSCAD model for a more compact case, we need the dimensions of that PCB and those tabs…
Start with a picture of the back of the PCB against white paper, taken from a few feet to flatten the perspective:
img_3300 – Camera PCB on white paper Load it into The GIMP, zoom in, and pull a horizontal guide line down to about the middle of the image:
Camera PCB – horizontal guide – scaled Rotate to align the two screws horizontally (they need not be centered on the guide, just lined up horizontally):
Camera PCB – rotated to match horizontal guide – scaled Use the Magic Scissors to select the PCB border (it’s the nearly invisible ragged dotted outline):
Camera PCB – scissors selection – scaled Flip to Quick Mask mode and clean up the selection as needed:
Camera PCB – quick mask cleanup – scaled Flip back to normal view, invert the selection (to select the background, not the PCB), and delete the background to isolate the PCB:
Camera PCB – isolated – scaled Tight-crop the PCB and flatten the image to get a white background:
Camera PCB – isolated – scaled Fetch some digital graph paper from your favorite online source. The Multi-color (Light Blue / Light Blue / Light Grey) Multi-weight (1.0×0.6×0.3 pt) grid (1 / 2 / 10) works best for me, but do what you like. Get a full Letter / A4 size sheet, because it’ll come in handy for other projects.
Open it up (converting at 300 dpi), turn it into a layer atop the PCB image, use the color-select tool to select the white background between the grid lines, then delete the selection to leave just the grid with transparency:
Camera PCB with grid overlay – unscaled We want one minor grid square to be 1×1 mm on the PCB image, sooo…
- Accurately measure a large feature on the real physical object: 27.2 mm across the tabs
- Drag the grid to align a major line with one edge of the PCB
- Count the number of minor square across to the other side of the image: 29.5
- Scale the grid overlay layer by image/physical size: 1.085 = 29.5/27.2
- Drag the grid so it’s neatly centered on the object (or has a major grid intersection somewhere useful)
That produces a calibrated overlay:
Camera PCB with grid overlay Then it’s just a matter of reading off the coordinates, with each minor grid square representing 1.0 mm in the real world, and writing some OpenSCAD code…
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Blueberry Season: Stink Bug Eggs
Mary’s been picking blueberries and freezing them for winter treats, a process that involves inspecting each berry laid out on the tray.
This one failed QC:
Blueberry with eggs – overview A closer look shows some remarkable structures:
Blueberry with eggs – detail Unfortunately, they’ll probably turn into Brown Marmorated Stink Bugs. This is not a Good Thing, because those stink bugs will devastate fruit harvests, including all the apple orchards along the entire Hudson Valley, over the next few years.
They may be Predatory Stink Bugs, which would be unusual in Dutchess County, but not nearly so awful.
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Water Heater Thermophile
One of my fundamental rules is that you should never, ever look inside the water lines serving your faucets. Having recently replaced a water heater, I had to violate that rule and discovered this growth inside the flex tube at the hot water outlet:
Growth in Hot Water Heater Tube Anything that can thrive in 120 °F water gets my grudging respect.
Scrubbing it with a toothbrush produced gray sludge that rinsed right out, so I guess it’s all good now…
The Smell of Molten Projects in the Morning 